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Review Joyce Grenfell / Joyce Grenfell - The BBC Collection [1964]
Release date: 2007-03-12
Run time: 215 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £12.44

Review Joyce Grenfell - The BBC Collection [1964] / Joyce Grenfell:


Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / The Guns Of Navarone (Special Edition) [1961]
Actors & Directors
  • Stanley Baker
  • Gregory Peck
  • Anthony Quinn
  • J. Lee Thompson
  • Anthony Quayle
  • David Niven
Release date: 2007-02-12
Run time: 150 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.75

Review The Guns Of Navarone (Special Edition) [1961] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:


Review Bfi Video / Bigger Than Life [1956]
Actors & Directors
  • Walter Matthau
  • Nicholas Ray
  • James Mason
Release date: 2007-07-30
Run time: 95 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £7.66

Review Bigger Than Life [1956] / Bfi Video:


Review Universal Pictures UK / Bing Crosby Collection - Going My Way / The Bells Of St. Mary's
Actors & Directors
  • Bing Crosby
Release date: 2006-05-08
RRP: £15.99
Price: £4.97

Review Bing Crosby Collection - Going My Way / The Bells Of St. Mary's / Universal Pictures UK:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Mandy [1952]
Actors & Directors
  • Alexander MacKendrick
  • Mandy Miller
  • Jack Hawkins
  • Terence Morgan
  • Phyllis Calvert
Release date: 2008-01-28
Run time: 87 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.06

Review Mandy [1952] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Universal Pictures UK / The Killers [1946]
Actors & Directors
  • Edmund O'Brien
  • Robert Siodmak
  • Albert Dekker
  • Sam Levene
  • Burt Lancaster
  • Ava Gardner
Release date: 2007-02-12
Run time: 105 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.97

Review The Killers [1946] / Universal Pictures UK:

This 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story adds well over an hour of new material to the original tale. The reason is, while director Robert Siodmak, star Burt Lancaster, and an outstanding supporting cast are faithful to Hemingway's work, his story only takes up about 15 minutes of screen time. Burt Lancaster plays the doomed man sought by hired guns in a small town. Hemingway's bruisingly concise dialogue makes an early sequence set in a diner quite unnerving, but after the killers dispense with their prey, Siodmak turns to an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) who looks into the reasons behind the murder. An exemplary film noir (complete with a fickle femme fatale played by Ava Gardner), The Killers is all mood and fatalism. -Tom Keogh.

Review MGM Entertainment / The Killing [1956]
Actors & Directors
  • Coleen Gray
  • Sterling Hayden
  • Jay C. Flippen
  • Elisha Cook Jr.
  • Stanley Kubrick
  • Vince Edwards
Release date: 2002-07-15
Run time: 80 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £2.97

Review The Killing [1956] / MGM Entertainment:

Among Stanley Kubrick's early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick's eye. With a dry narration we're introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it's being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it. On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that's been dug up as an extra. -Paul Tonks.

Review MGM Entertainment / Thunderbirds Are Go - The Movie [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Sylvia Anderson
  • Peter Dyneley
  • Christine Finn
  • Ray Barrett
  • Alexander Davion
  • David Lane
Release date: 2001-04-09
Run time: 89 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £8.80

Review Thunderbirds Are Go - The Movie [1966] / MGM Entertainment:

Thunderbirds Are Go followed the remarkable success of the Thunderbirds television series, bringing the three-dimensional puppet animation adventures of International Rescue to the big screen. Set in the 21st century, there is no attempt to explain the background story: as in the TV show International Rescue is a private family organisation who use hi-tech craft to rescue anyone in peril. Here it is the first manned flight to Mars which is in danger, as International Rescue foils a sabotage attempt at the launch, then race to avert disaster when the spaceship returns to earth. What could have made a 50-minute TV episode is expanded to feature length with Martian "rock monsters" and a surreal dream-sequence involving Alan Tracy, Lady Penelope and "Cliff Richard Jnr" & the Shadows, with a new song performed by the real Cliff and the Shadows. In the cinemas this was competing against another British children's TV SF spin-off, the equally colourful Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150AD, and would be followed by Thunderbird 6 (1968). Yet apart from more complex model work, a bigger orchestra and even bigger explosions, on TV this plays like a widescreen double-length episode. On the DVD: The mono sound is powerful, with Barry Gray's stirring music suffering intermittent distortion. Presented in anamorphic widescreen the picture is very good, with strong colours and only minimal grain, though the print does show occasional damage. Unfortunately the original extremely wide 2. 74:1 Techniscope image is cropped to more conventional 2. [+]
35:1, to the extent that the careful compositions are noticeably damaged, which director David Lane refers to in his joint commentary with producer Sylvia Anderson (who also played Lady Penelope). 35 years after the event their commentary is packed with details of the filming process and full of information about the many problems of and solutions to making an animated feature. Both Anderson fans and budding animators will find this a real education. The original, rather battered, trailer is included, as are galleries of behind the scenes photos, promotional artwork and posters. Altogether it's rather FABulous. -Gary S Dalkin.

Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Yield To The Night [1956]
Actors & Directors
  • Geoffrey Keen
  • Michael Craig
  • Yvonne Mitchell
  • J. Lee Thompson
  • Diana Dors
Release date: 2008-01-28
Run time: 95 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.78

Review Yield To The Night [1956] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review BFI DVD Publishing / Jan Svankmajer - The Complete Short Films [1964]
Actors & Directors
  • Jan Svankmajer
Release date: 2007-05-28
Run time: 313 min.
RRP: £29.99
Price: £21.02

Review Jan Svankmajer - The Complete Short Films [1964] / BFI DVD Publishing:


Review ITV DVD / Captain Scarlet - Complete Series Box Set [1967]
Actors & Directors
  • Neil McCallum
  • Lian-Shin
  • Janna Hill
  • Sylvia Anderson
  • David Healy
Release date: 2001-09-17
Run time: 860 min.
RRP: £75.99
Price: £32.97

Review Captain Scarlet - Complete Series Box Set [1967] / ITV DVD:

First broadcast in 1967, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons was the most grown-up of all Gerry Anderson's SuperMarionation adventures. There are gadgets and toy-friendly machines galore, of course-like the Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle, the Angel Aircraft and Cloudbase itself-but, unlike the colourful fantasies of Stingray and Thunderbirds, this series' concern with an implacable, vengeful enemy, conspiracies and double-agents drew its inspiration from James Bond and the Cold War spy dramas of the 1960s. Special effects whiz Derek Meddings imbues the action sequences with a truly Bondian grandeur and, like the sinister Spectre of the Bond films, the Martian Mysterons seem all the more hostile for their unseen presence, their agents infiltrating every organisation dedicated to their destruction just as it seemed the Soviets were doing at the time. The indestructible Captain Scarlet is killed then resurrected every week (though not like South Park's Kenny), and more often than not the unstoppable Mysterons emerge triumphant, and always undefeated. The varied cast of Spectrum agents and their voice characterisations also aim at verisimilitude (Captain Scarlet, voiced by Francis Matt hews, sounds like a grim Cary Grant), while the puppetry is more realistic than ever. This box set contains all 32 episodes, with newly remastered picture and Dolby 5. 1 surround sound. The DVD box also includes extra features on each disc, plus a sixth documentary disc, "Captain Scarlet: S. I. G. [+]
". In its new digital incarnation, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons still looks and sounds like the epitome of 60s cool. -Mark Walker.

Review Network / Things To Come (Special Edition) [1936]
Actors & Directors
  • Ann Todd; Edward Chapman; Ralph Richardson; Raymond Massey; Cedric Hardwicke
Release date: 2007-05-07
Run time: 89 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £7.00

Review Things To Come (Special Edition) [1936] / Network:


Review MGM Entertainment / James Bond - Dr No (Ultimate Edition 2 Disc Set) [1962]
Actors & Directors
  • Ursula Andress
  • Jack Lord
  • Terence Young
  • Zena Marshall
  • Joseph Wiseman
  • Sean Connery
Release date: 2006-07-17
Run time: 105 min.
RRP: £16.99
Price: £3.69

Review James Bond - Dr No (Ultimate Edition 2 Disc Set) [1962] / MGM Entertainment:


Review Buena Vista Home Entertainment / The Great Raid [2005]
Actors & Directors
  • James Franco
  • John Dahl
  • Robert Mammone
  • Joseph Fiennes
  • Benjamin Bratt
  • Max Martini
Release date: 2006-06-12
Run time: 127 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £4.97

Review The Great Raid [2005] / Buena Vista Home Entertainment:

Nearly three years after it was filmed, The Great Raid finally appeared as a welcome reminder that good old-fashioned World War II movies never go out of style. While lacking the scale, prestige, and pulse-pounding momentum of Saving Private Ryan, this fact-based war drama benefits from a back-to-basics approach to realism and a rousing rescue climax that more than compensates for the slower passages that precede it. Adapted from the books The Great Raid on Cabanatuan and Ghost Soldiers, it chronicles the five-day mission (in late January 1945) to rescue 511 American prisoners of war held by the Japanese at Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines. Under the direction of neo-noir specialist John Dahl (The Last Seduction), the film's three-part structure follows the raid mission led by Lt. Col. Mucci (Benjamin Bratt); the plight of the POWs at Cabanatuan, including malaria-stricken Maj. Gibson (Joseph Fiennes); and civilian resistance in Manila as carried out by real-life hero and Gibson's (fictional) would-be lover Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen), whose effort to aid the POWs is vigilantly monitored by the enemy Japanese. In keeping with war-movie traditions, Dahl handles character and action with no-nonsense intelligence, favoring a slow build over pumped-up adrenalin. By the time the miraculous rescue is executed with critical assistance by Filpino guerillas, The Great Raid has earned its stripes, honoring the brave men who carried out the most successful rescue mission in U. S. [+]
military history. -Jeff Shannon.

Review MGM Entertainment / Paths Of Glory [1957]
Actors & Directors
  • George Macready
  • Ralph Meeker
  • Kirk Douglas
  • Wayne Morris
  • Adolphe Menjou
  • Stanley Kubrick
Release date: 2002-07-15
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £2.70

Review Paths Of Glory [1957] / MGM Entertainment:

The pity of war has been a much-favoured film topic; the treachery of war much less so, though never more persuasively than in Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick's breakthrough feature from 1957. Kirk Douglas gives one of his finest screen performances as Colonel Dax, the idealistic First World War soldier appalled by the arbitrary court-marshal meted out to three of his men after an impossible attempt to storm German lines goes disastrously wrong. George Macready is an utterly believable Gerneral Mireau, obsessed with his own honour and standing, whom Adolphe Majou complements tellingly as the urbane and cynical General Bruler. Those who know Kubrick from his later sprawling epics will be surprised at the tautness and concision shown here, even though the screenplay-which he co-wrote-has a certain theatrical stiffness. On the DVD: Paths of Glory on disc reproduces well in full-screen format, and Gerald Fried's bitingly ironic score comes through powerfully. There are five dubbed and six subtitled languages. The original trailer is a masterpiece of gritty reportage, well worth reviving. Along with Dr Strangelove and 2001, this is Kubrick's most focussed and durable film. -Richard Whitehouse.

Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Chase A Crooked Shadow [1957]
Actors & Directors
  • Anne Baxter
  • Herbert Lomas
  • Faith Brook
  • Michael Anderson
  • Alexander Knox
  • Richard Todd
Release date: 2007-11-05
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.37

Review Chase A Crooked Shadow [1957] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Hey Mr Producer! / Hey Mr Producer
Release date: 2005-11-14
Run time: 137 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £9.50

Review Hey Mr Producer / Hey Mr Producer!:


Review Elvis Presley / Elvis Presley - '68 Comeback Special (Special Edition)
Release date: 2006-08-14
Run time: 94 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.87

Review Elvis Presley - '68 Comeback Special (Special Edition) / Elvis Presley:


Review Bfi Video / Night And The City [1950]
Actors & Directors
  • Jules Dassin
  • Gene Tierney
  • Herbert Lom
  • Richard Widmark
Release date: 2007-10-15
Run time: 92 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £7.81

Review Night And The City [1950] / Bfi Video:


Review Network / Cottage To Let [1941]
Actors & Directors
  • Anthony Asquith
  • Leslie Banks
  • Carla Lehmann
  • John Mills
  • Jeanne De Casalis
  • Alastair Sim
Release date: 2007-02-05
Run time: 86 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £6.85

Review Cottage To Let [1941] / Network:


Browse Classics:

Models & Brands:
Joyce Grenfell - The BBC Collection [1964], The Guns Of Navarone (Special Edition) [1961], Bigger Than Life [1956], Bing Crosby Collection - Going My Way / The Bells Of St. Mary's, Mandy [1952], The Killers [1946], The Killing [1956], Thunderbirds Are Go - The Movie [1966], Yield To The Night [1956], Jan Svankmajer - The Complete Short Films [1964], Captain Scarlet - Complete Series Box Set [1967], Things To Come (Special Edition) [1936], James Bond - Dr No (Ultimate Edition 2 Disc Set) [1962], The Great Raid [2005], Paths Of Glory [1957], Chase A Crooked Shadow [1957], Hey Mr Producer, Elvis Presley - '68 Comeback Special (Special Edition), Night And The City [1950], Cottage To Let [1941]

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